In Shadows and Dust
by ncfan
Summary: Children mirror their parents. Or, conversely, Ryuuken is having flashbacks, and Uryuu becomes the point where past meets present.


**Characters**: Ryuuken, Uryuu, Soken, Sayuri, Isshin, others.**  
Summary: **Children mirror their parents. Or, conversely, Ryuuken is having flashbacks at inconvenient moments, and Uryuu becomes the point where past meets present.**  
Pairings**: Nothing that affects the plot.**  
Warnings/Spoilers**: Spoilers for the Arrancar arc.**  
Timeline**: No time in particular, and the flashbacks are not in chronological order.**  
Author's Note**: I'm reading _Fight Club_ right now, and it's affecting my mental state somewhat. I had an urge to write this, but it's anyone's guess as to whether this will be coherent at all when it's finished. This acts as a companion to _Moments of Dysfunction _and _Islands in the Sea_, and references an event that takes place in _Waiting Room Talks._**  
Disclaimer**: I don't own Bleach.

* * *

On first glance, they don't look much alike. Scratch that, they barely look anything alike, to the point that people who cast a side glance at them can hardly tell that they are father and son. One is a middle-aged man with hair gone silver from age, stress and grief, but otherwise shows his age only in crows' feet around his brown eyes that appear only when he's squinting. The other is a skinny teenager, black hair falling over the milk white skin of his face.

When it is discovered that they are in fact related, the abashed observer usually makes some muttered, tactless comment that Uryuu must take after his mother, and Ryuuken is definitely inclined to agree, especially when Uryuu is still a small child and his face is still round, if thin for a child's, and his eyes are still wide the way Sayuri's were.

Second observations do discern some similarities, reveals that blood always guarantees that something will be the same.

Ryuuken first really notices when the boy is about sixteen. _It's his hands_, he thinks numbly. Long and loose in the fingers, as his own have always been. But the calluses are not as deeply ingrained, and his hands are slightly smaller. The blood caking Uryuu's fingernails messes up the scene, making it harder than ever to tell.

The face glaring at Ryuuken is a mirror image of both of his parents, a smaller reflection of his own and a distorted photo negative of his mother's, blurred and grainy, and as Ryuuken stops to ponder, and observe at an objective distance, he starts to see similarities everywhere, in the son who's been a stranger to him but is suddenly starting to become much more familiar.

.

In anger, Uryuu's face has a set to it that, predictably, matches up with Ryuuken's fairly reliably. That's hardly a surprise to the boy's father, who has by now gotten used to seeing that dark scowl, bordering on a soundless snarl as the primary predictor of whatever emotions Uryuu is feeling when they are together.

Sharp.

Acerbic.

Barbed.

Angry at his father for making him feel like the child he knows he's not anymore.

_The night Uryuu's being born, Ryuuken's been kicked out of the maternity ward because he can't calm down. The last thing he hears before the attending physician gently but firmly ushers him out of the room is Sayuri laughing weakly and calling after him, and telling him it will be alright._

_To the highly flustered Ryuuken, he has no idea how she can be so calm._

_At his somewhat frantic call, the Kurosakis show up, Isshin keeping Ryuuken company in the waiting room with all the car crash victims and flu patients. And, in the interim, Isshin decides…to be himself. Specifically, he decides to be himself and irritate the already tightly wound Ryuuken even further._

_The discussion comes to a head when talk of telling the children and torment in eight months comes into play, and Isshin seems to have finally calmed down to the point that he's willing to leave Ryuuken alone… Until he picks right back up where he left off._

_It is at this point that Ryuuken loses his cool entirely, takes aim, and breaks Isshin's nose with one well-aimed punch._

_Isshin falls onto the floor, clutching his bleeding nose and gaping accusingly up at Ryuuken as if he hasn't been baiting Ryuuken for the past half hour and as if he couldn't see any of this coming._

_"My nose!" Isshin exclaims indignantly._

_"Be glad it wasn't your neck," Ryuuken answers ominously._

_Fifteen minutes later, Soken shows up in the hospital emergency waiting room, and his mouth drops open slightly when he drinks in the situation._

_Two young men, sitting in chairs with everyone else in the room eyeing them in decidedly leery fashion, as if they expect a bomb to go off at any second. Isshin is still clutching his nose, the gush of blood having slacked off to a slow trickle, and Ryuuken is glaring into nothing, grinding his teeth against each other._

_Soken leans down in front of his son and puts one cracked, blue-veined hand on his cheek. He sighs. "I get the impression that I should have been here a few minutes earlier, to stop Isshin from saying whatever it is he said, and to stop you from doing whatever it is you did, son."_

_Ryuuken can't dispute logic like that._

_At that moment, Soken decides to take pre-emptive action to head off another potential clash, and gently pulls Ryuuken out into the frigid November cold so they can talk and Ryuuken can calm down._

As they shout at each other from the opposite ends of a cavernous metal chamber, voices echoing eerily off of the walls to sound as though there is a whole chorus instead of simply two men slinging volleys of thinly veiled barbs and threats at each other, Uryuu almost seems swallowed by his anger. It's made even more startling by the very slight thinness (how tautly tense and arch-backed he holds himself doesn't make it any better) of Uryuu's body; _either doesn't eat enough or just has an even higher metabolism than most other teenagers, still too thin_, and Ryuuken can't help but notice how the bones of his elbows jut out from his arms and how his kneecaps probably do the same (it's impossible to tell considering how Uryuu constantly wears long pants). Uryuu's bones are most prominent at his wrists and at his knuckles, where the skin seems pulled too tightly over bone.

And all of it, all of Uryuu's delicate, fluted bones, crackle with anger.

The furious, shouted words ring in Ryuuken's ears. "It's never enough for you, is it!"

No, it's really not. Ryuuken thought Uryuu knew this by now; the boy has to push himself harder, learn to drive his limits faster, if he wants to survive.

Ryuuken stares up at him, narrows his eyes so the thin, fine lines appear again, and wonders where his so-young son has learned such anger.

.

Isshin once tells Ryuuken that his face looks much better when he isn't actively frowning.

He's drunk, of course. Stupid things tend to issue from Isshin's mouth when he's drunk, and this time is no different, Ryuuken thinks, as they sit at the bar and listen to the music grind out a song Ryuuken hates.

In fact, this is the night, the only night, that Ryuuken himself ever drinks enough to get drunk himself. He blames Isshin for this, all the way, and he can still remember the splitting pain of the hangover the next morning— Actually, no, he can't. If Ryuuken could remember it, it wouldn't be a real hangover. It's a very dim blur, the morning after, and all Ryuuken can really remember is the sensation of ear-splitting pain and the awful aftertaste of cheap sake clinging to the inside of his mouth like a parasite.

Ryuuken never fails to be thankful that Sayuri never finds out about that night. She would have never have let him live it down.

What Isshin tells Ryuuken ends up applying to Uryuu as well. When he's not wearing his habitual frown, Uryuu's face becomes an entirely different road map.

Vividly does Ryuuken remember the look on Uryuu's face when he finishes off the Arrancar who nearly had him crushed in his enormous jaws.

Wide-eyed shock, blue eyes with thick eyelashes going so wide that they look set to bug clean out of his face. There's almost an air of belligerence to Uryuu's sheer incredulity. Before it turns to the discomfort masked with brittle anger that has characterized Uryuu's relationship with his father from a day dating back over four years ago, Ryuuken takes a moment and almost smiles at how ridiculously like his mother Uryuu looks when truly surprised. He would have, too, if he hadn't been so disgusted at Uryuu's sheer cluelessness.

_The night is bringing up the sensation of chirping crickets again, but it's warm and muggy and nearly thirty years in the past, and the Hollow that's screaming this time is far more prosaic than the botched Arrancar, and the cause of more trouble besides._

_Ryuuken is lying on the ground, Sayuri with her blood-stained white school shirt shining like a beacon in the night standing over him and frowning, and as he looks at her and starts to clamber back to his feet, limbs screaming, he can't believe that this is his first time noticing the sharp flare of her reiatsu, and for the first time it hits him exactly what that means._

_But he has absolutely no time to gather his thoughts, because in that very moment Sayuri is questioning something Ryuuken mentioned earlier, about not doing this very often._

_The answer is very simple._

_Ryuuken has never been a great lover of battle. It's not his problem, he maintains; he is very much alive, and would prefer to stay that way, thank you. Dying in a Hollow's gut is not the way he wants to go out, and he has no intention of dying stupidly as his race tends to do. Ryuuken only involves himself in the killing of Hollows when he sees a Plus or a living human being attacked, because while Ryuuken doesn't shoot at a hollow without reason, he can not in clear conscience let an attack take place before his very eyes. That is the only good enough reason for him, to put his neck on the line._

_To say that Sayuri takes issue with this is an understatement of epic proportions._

_They are just two sixteen-year-olds, but both have very decided opinions about how the world works, and Sayuri's perception of life and her life as a Quincy is decidedly different from Ryuuken's._

_However, they never manage to finish the heated debate about life outlooks, because the Hollow's getting back up and shrieking at them. _

_The look on Sayuri's face is, to put it plainly, quite priceless at that moment, but neither of them have much time to comment as they both nearly break their necks whipping around, turning their attention back on the task at hand._

_Sayuri jumps straight back into the fray with a ferocity that Ryuuken would be lying to himself if he didn't find admirable. Of course, there's always the off chance that Sayuri's suicidal and that her fighting in front of him is just a particularly desperate cry for help._

_If he lets her fight on alone, she'll most likely be killed. That's what Ryuuken's telling himself as he sighs and marches off to join her. Now that he's seeing some being attacked, he can't ignore it anymore._

Uryuu quickly wipes the shock off of his face, though it still remains, and Ryuuken doesn't find it worth telling him why he fights and for whom he fights. Only Sayuri was ever able to get an explanation out of Ryuuken, only Sayuri had that right; that much, even when he has become a person that she would not be able to recognize, has not changed.

.

Mortification, sheer, utter embarrassment and shame, is always something that makes Uryuu react in accordance with his father.

The morning after Uryuu kills his first Hollow, after a brief conversation which quickly degenerates into an exchange of sharp words, a particularly painful revelation sends Uryuu darting away from the kitchen table without a word, face eggshell white, as he barely stops to grab his school books and his shoes before shooting out the front door, without so much as a goodbye. Not that he says goodbye much anymore to begin with.

Ryuuken sits down at the table, cups his forehead in one hand, and doesn't bother trying to call Uryuu back.

It takes a moment for the guilt to sink in in earnest, with confusion and skewed thoughts making a bitter concoction. _I thought he already knew._ Out of all the ways Ryuuken had thought Uryuu would eventually find out about how his mother had died, this wasn't one of them.

No, wait.

Ryuuken hadn't given any thought to it at all. And that was where he had gone wrong.

_The sound of rushing water fills his ears as Ryuuken stares down at the river below him, swollen with a recent rain, in honest trepidation. He's nine years old and can't swim to save his life, but is contemplating whether or not he should just jump into the river anyway._

_It's highly debatable, and Ryuuken eventually decides he's just going to find a bank instead of the small outcropping he's standing on the ledge of, and just wade into the river that way._

_Until someone decides to make his choice for him._

_Ryuuken feels a large hand on his back, and said hand shoves him forward so he goes falling off of the outcropping and into the river below._

_This isn't the way Ryuuken wanted to learn how to swim._

_He thrashes about frantically in the water until he hears a voice. "Hey. Stand up."_

_A little girl about Ryuuken's age is standing over him, an expression on her face that's halfway between a sympathetic smile and a look of absolute incredulity. There's also a laugh hiding behind her voice._

_She's smaller than Ryuuken, a hairsbreadth shorter, with short, clipped black hair that doesn't even reach to her shoulders and wide, bright blue eyes gleaming with mirth. The ends of her pants are soaked with river water._

"_You see?" she asks, still smiling. "The water's only knee-deep."_

_Ryuuken can tell his face is going beet red, and he looks away. "Oh…gosh, I…umm…I didn't…know that."_

_The black-haired girl frowns and looks up, and Ryuuken sees a tall teenaged boy with long black hair bound back in a ponytail, staring down at them. His deep blue eyes are identical in shade to the girl's. "Niisan!" she calls, annoyed. "That wasn't nice; I don't think he can swim!"_

_A year later Ryuuken's entering the fifth grade and he is absolutely mortified to recognize the girl sitting in the desk in front of him, until, after two weeks of stuttering and blushing every time she so much as glances his way, she turns and looks at him after class has ended, smiles, and says, "You're the boy from the river, aren't you? I don't think you ever told me your name."_

When Ryuuken gets home from work, he is ready and waiting for Uryuu to get home from school, sitting in the living room.

The door creaks open. If Uryuu was hoping to sneak back in without Ryuuken noticing, than he is simply out of luck.

Uryuu is still sore from his tussle with a Hollow the previous night, his movements less than subtle, and the cuts on his arms have started to bruise. Ryuuken eyes his son's lacerated arms and doubts that what he can see is the full extent of his injuries. He puts down his book and stands up.

"Alright." Uryuu stiffens and stops walking, unwilling to turn around. "Take off your shirt and sit down."

Blue eyes are absolutely incredulous. "What?"

"Just do it."

Ryuuken's suspicions prove correct. Uryuu is covered in long, bruised scratches, leaving ugly blue, purple and yellow blotches all over his torso, to the extent that Uryuu somewhat resembles a piece of bruised fruit, though there seems to be no more serious damage than that. There's a roll of bandages and a bottle of disinfectant sitting on the coffee table, as Ryuuken gets down to work. The twelve-year-old says nothing throughout, as tense and nervous as anyone can get.

He'll have to do this himself. Ryuuken's memory of something Sayuri once said sums it up perfectly. _"How are you going to explain _this_ to the ER?"_

Immortal words.

Uryuu's right about one thing. Ryuuken can't stop him from attacking Hollows. He can't keep an eye on his son twenty-four hours a day. He _can_, however, be sure that Uryuu's injuries are treated afterwards, and that the process is as uncomfortable for him as possible, as Uryuu flinches away from the sharp hiss of the astringent disinfectant, and Ryuuken puts a hand on his shoulder, jerks him back and makes him hold still.

_A soft laugh greets Ryuuken's ears, and Soken is smiling amusedly and shaking his head. "Ryuuken, you're holding the baby like he's a sack of flour."_

_Ryuuken's highly affronted expression shows exactly what he thinks of that._

_Soken laughs again and beckons his son forward. "Come here. Let me show you." Ryuuken gets a crash course on how to hold a baby from his father that night, as he hands Uryuu over to him._

Ryuuken feels a pallor come over his face, white and taut, as he takes a look at a horizontal laceration on Uryuu's back. It seems plain to him that the Hollow had intended to lop off Uryuu's head but missed. Sickened shock hits his spine. His jaw tightens.

"You're luckier than you know," he murmurs.

"Sir?"

"Nothing, Uryuu."

.

In fear, Uryuu has a face entirely unique to himself.

_Ryuuken flinches when he feels the Hollow's monstrous reiatsu emanating from nearby in the city, but he keeps on walking, trying to ignore the reiatsu as he has grown so accustomed to doing._

_Uryuu is not so lucky._

_The boy is just six years old, and like most spiritually sensitive children is easily overcome by the spiritual pressure of a Hollow. He's been bowled over, in fact, and Ryuuken feels two small hands latch onto his pant leg._

_Uryuu's face is bathed in cold sweat, his eyes screwed shut and his face contorted in fear. He's stopped walking and is shaking convulsively, trying and failing to block out the Hollow's reiatsu._

"_Keep walking, Uryuu," Ryuuken half-whispers. "It can't hurt you, not from here."_

_This doesn't do much to comfort him, as he shakes his head and whimpers. "I…I can't…"_

_At that point, Ryuuken leans down and deftly sweeps his son into his arms. "Come on, then. You're getting just a little heavy for this, though."_

"_Sorry."_

"_Don't be."_

Fear is unique to every living being. No one's fear strongly resembles another's, so Uryuu is entirely alone on that.

Then, fear is solitary too.

.

"_I hate funerals."_

"_I know you do. That's why I figured you wouldn't show up to this one."_

_Ryuuken puts a hand on Isshin's shoulder, feeling his lips tighten. "You needed a friend," he murmurs, narrowing his eyes. "And Masaki was my friend, too."_

"_Thanks."_

_There's a little orange-haired boy sitting under a nearby tree, crying and trying to hide it. Ryuuken wonders briefly where Isshin's two daughters are, but realizes that Isshin probably left them with his in-laws and drops the issue._

_Isshin hasn't looked at him the whole time and his eyes have settled on the hard-packed ground, dull and glassy like dusty windows._

"_It's a terrible thing to know, isn't it?" Ryuuken hesitates, whispering and wondering if Isshin has even heard him. It doesn't matter much either way though, and Ryuuken's going to say it whether Isshin wants to hear it or not. "That everyone whom you love will either reject you or die."_

_A moment passes in silence, and Isshin behaves as though he hasn't heard. Ryuuken shoots a sad-eyed look at his friend before regaining his composure._

_Then, Isshin nods. "Yeah. It is."_

Uryuu displays signs of both of his parents in his rare open moments of grief and sorrow, a stained representation of raw sadness that, however much he tries to hide it, still manages to shine through at the most inconvenient moments. Sayuri's quiet mourning, combined with Ryuuken's inability to express grief in anything resembling a healthy fashion.

_When he's fourteen, Ryuuken experiences the first death in his immediate family, that of his mother._

_Though his mother had been extremely sick for weeks (her illness due to radiation poisoning from the droppings of the atomic bombs almost thirty years prior), when she dies, it still comes as a crippling body blow._

_Soken is of no help, still trying to process his grief himself, and the opinions of father and son concerning death are highly divergent. What comfort Soken has for his son Ryuuken interprets as meaningless psychobabble. Needless to say, Ryuuken neither listens to nor accepts what his father is trying to tell him._

_It's the first day Ryuuken's been back to school, and he's sitting on the curb after school's let out in the afternoon, as the students mill out and disperse, heading back towards home._

_Ryuuken makes no attempt to get up and melt into the crowd._

_Finally, it's just two girls, regular stragglers in leaving the school in the bright, sunny afternoon. Ryuuken knows them both; they're friends, if not close friends of his._

"_I'm sorry, Masaki," he hears one of them say to the other. "I'm not going to be able to come over with you today."_

"_Okay. I'll see you tomorrow, then?"_

"_Sure."_

_A bag hits the ground as the dark-haired girl sits down beside Ryuuken on the curb, her hands on her knees, her friend starting to walk off._

"_Ishida-kun?" Sayuri's voice is sad and quiet, her blue eyes narrowed in sympathy; her characteristic bright smile is gone from her face. "I…heard about your mother. I'm sorry."_

"_Thank you." He's saying it only because it's polite, and wishes she would just leave. Human proximity is harmful these days._

"_Ishida-kun?" This time around, Sayuri sounds curious instead of sad; she's peering closely at Ryuuken's face. "Are you crying?"_

"_No," Ryuuken responds, too quickly, horrified by the way his voice cracks on the single syllable because it, as does the wetness on his cheeks and his glasses, gives him away without question._

_Sayuri, who is observant to a degree that Ryuuken often finds uncomfortable, doesn't buy it. "Yes," she insists, "you are, and I don't see why you should try to hide it."_

_Ryuuken stares at her uncomprehendingly._

_In response, Sayuri tilts her head to one side, her expression growing more sympathetically melancholic. "Your mother's dead; if you weren't crying, I'd have to fear for your sanity, or just assume you're not human." Her lip twists in the failed simulation of a smile. "It hurts; I know, believe me. But you're still breathing, and life doesn't end with the death of someone you love."_

It's probably the best piece of advice anyone has ever given him, and Ryuuken finds that one of the more painfully ironic aspects of his life is that he simply can not follow it.

The day after Soken's death, when Uryuu comes back home from school, his eyes are no less bloodshot than they were when he left that morning. His face is dry, however.

If Uryuu sheds any more tears over his grandfather's death, Ryuuken never knows about it, and it starts to bother him, that the boy is no longer comfortable showing grief in front of him.

.

Despite what others might think, neither Ryuuken nor Uryuu are cruel men, nor are they much given to egregious malice. One wouldn't know that from watching them interact, though, a study in practiced, barbed blows and double-edged blades.

At times, they are strangers. At others, they know each other far too well for the comfort of either.

But Ryuuken knows one thing. It's that he and Uryuu know each other well enough that they know how to hurt each other.

_And it's almost all we know anymore._

.

Uryuu doesn't smile very often anymore. He used to, but not anymore.

But he's smiling now, which Ryuuken finds utterly bizarre and out of place. That doesn't mean it isn't happening, though.

Smiling, Uryuu's pale face looks considerably softer, more relaxed (He plainly doesn't know that Ryuuken's standing nearby, observing in a way that almost borders on voyeurism). The smile is meant for the girl sitting next to him but somehow extends to all of the people there, the eclectic group of people Uryuu calls his friends.

While Ryuuken finds it appropriate that Uryuu's face would resemble his in anger, he didn't ever think that they would have the same smile. For a moment, Ryuuken tries to tell himself that it's her smile he's seeing, but he remembers that Sayuri always smiled with her teeth, and Uryuu certainly doesn't do that.

There was only a small group of people who were ever capable of getting Ryuuken to smile, and usually only after much coaxing, wheedling and provoking. He didn't have a reputation of being pretty stony-faced for nothing. Somehow, memories of happiness always brought back one of the more bizarre scenes of Ryuuken's past, and that would be Isshin and Sayuri doing their rendition of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight".

Isshin was drunk. Isshin was _always_ drunk when he did things like that, and he wasn't much of a singer to begin with. Sayuri however, was completely sober, and when Ryuuken shot off another totally nonplussed look at her, she only grinned back. Masaki seemed to find all of this very funny, but Ryuuken could only stare.

He started smiling about halfway through. Isshin was starting to sag on the karaoke stage, something that was pretty typical of him, and Ryuuken was wondering why on earth he had even bothered to come in the first place.

He didn't realize he had said that out loud until Masaki turned to him, smiled, and said, "Because you'd worry all night long about how Isshin was going to get home."

It was true, Ryuuken had to admit. It was the only reason he had volunteered to be Isshin's designated driver in the first place, because he worried about the big idiot. For a Shinigami, Isshin could be terribly inobservant, especially when drunk.

At that point, Ryuuken decided to resign himself to enjoying it.

He had loved those people. His parents, Sayuri, Masaki, even Isshin, though he irritated him to no end and Ryuuken would have often classified Isshin as the bane of his existence, simply because Isshin was being Isshin.

Uryuu has rarely seen this smile, and when he has, he usually forgets about it later. Which is quite ironic, considering he is the _only_ person his father smiles for anymore.

It wouldn't have made much of a difference in their later behavior anyway.

It's better this way.

No more pretending to be polite.

No more tiptoeing around each other.

No more avoiding the eyes of the other.

No more damned ambiguity.

Just pained, conflicted, _tortured _animosity.

_It's a small creak of the springs in the mattress that wakes Ryuuken up. It's the middle of the night, pitch black, and his mind is still heavy with sleep, as he opens his eyes and seeks out the source, already half-knowing what_—who—_he's looking for._

_Blue eyes meet his, round as coins and filled with a film of trepidation, as Uryuu quite literally holds his breath and stares up at him, waiting for what he will do. His face is, as far as Ryuuken can tell in the inky darkness, salt-white and drained, but devoid of tears. Good. That will make this somewhat easier._

_It's the nightmares again. It has to be the nightmares, and Ryuuken can hardly blame him. If there's anything to have nightmares about, Hollows would be it. It's the lot of the spiritually sensitive, to see monsters in the dark shadows and the blackness of night._

_Ryuuken isn't quite sure where Uryuu gets the impression that he is someone to be feared. He hesitates a moment, and wonders if he should send him back to his own room._

_Uryuu will have to face his fears alone eventually. But not, Ryuuken decides, will that night be tonight. He runs a hand down the back of his son's head, connecting with soft blue-black hair and smoothing it down, his face softening, and rests his hand on Uryuu's shoulder blades, closing his eyes and trying to get back to sleep._

_Uryuu's exhale of breath is highly audible._

_As he feels Uryuu press his head up against his chest and small hands cling to his shirt, Ryuuken smiles slightly, before going back to sleep._

_They'll talk in the morning._

_

* * *

_Yeah, I think reading _Fight Club_ has made me lose my mind. And I've only gotten to the part where Marla is screaming at the protagonist about making her mother into soap. Favoriting and not reviewing isn't appreciated.


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